Lost in the Great Fire: which London buildings disappeared in the 1666 blaze?

Lost in the Great Fire: which London buildings disappeared in the 1666 blaze?

This week 350 years ago, the Great Fire of London burned through 400 of the city’s streets. Matthew Green reveals the extraordinary structures lost in the blaze – from old St Paul’s to a riverside castle – and what survived, only to vanish later

Clockwise from top left: Bridewell Palace, Castle Baynard, old St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Exchange

“Oh the miserable and calamitous spectacle!” wrote John Evelyn in 1666, “mine eyes … now saw above 10,000 houses all in one flame.” The conflagration he witnessed from 2-5 September destroyed much of the medieval metropolis, swallowing 400 streets, 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and 44 livery halls.

Many of the City of London’s most iconic buildings were consumed: St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Exchange, Newgate Prison, Christ’s Hospital, even Whittington’s Longhouse, one of the biggest public toilets in Europe, in the Vintry. Evelyn was aghast at the destruction of so much of the medieval centre: “London was, but is no more”.

Yet this wasn’t exactly true. By the time of the fire, only a quarter of London’s population actually lived in the walled city, compared to three-quarters a century earlier. The growing eastern suburbs like Wapping and Stepney were left unscathed – as were much of Holborn, the Temple, western Fleet Street, the Strand, and the emergent squares of the West End.

Nor, as contemporary scorch maps reveal, did the fire even decimate the whole of the walled city: around four-fifths of it was destroyed (an area of 373 acres), leaving the north-eastern and some eastern parts (including the Tower of London) unaffected thanks to the gusty east wind.

It was here, outside the fire’s trail of destruction, that many extraordinary buildings survived only to be destroyed later on – whether by demolition works, other fires, or bombs. As we reach the 350th anniversary of the fire, it is fitting to commemorate not just the buildings destroyed in those four hellish days in September, but also some of those that survived, only to vanish later on.

Landmark buildings destroyed in the Great Fire ...

This riverside castle was built in the late 13th century, inheriting the name of a destroyed castle further to the west – the Tower of London’s lost twin – that had been built by the Norman Ralph Baynard after the Conquest. Many of Henry VIII’s wives lived here and, according to tradition, Richard of Gloucester was offered the crown here in 1483.

After several rebuilds, it appeared on the eve of the fire as a big, brooding stone structure with gabled projecting towers soaring from the Thames, a dock, thick curtain walls, central courtyard, and meaty turrets. The scene of lavish banquets and coronations, the castle was destroyed save for one round tower, later converted into a house, now vanished. Today, part of the site is occupied by a brutalist office block and commemorated by a blue plaque on Castle Baynard Street, just south of St Paul’s Cathedral.

A print of Bridewell Palace published in 1755 by an Act of Parliament for survey. Illustration: Culture Club/Getty

Bridewell Palace

Built in 1515-20 on the western bank of the River Fleet near Blackfriars, this lost inner-city palace was one of Henry VIII’s favourites. It was a large, rambling brick structure set around three courtyards with gardens and a private wharf. An imposing feature of the riverfront, it was probably the scene of Catherine of Aragon’s final meeting with the king in 1529 (over a quarrelsome dinner).

Under Henry’s son Edward VI, it became a poorhouse but was decimated on the third day of the Great Fire. The Fleet, contrary to expectations, proved no firebreak at all even though attempts were made to pull down the riverside houses. Something of the palace’s stateliness lives on in the Ionic columns of Unilever House, the art deco building that occupies the site today.

The Cheapside Cross, with the Great Conduit to the right of it. Illustration: Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty

The Great Conduit

Advantageously located next to St Paul’s Cathedral and considerably grander and more spacious than the rest of the City’s labyrinthine streets, Cheapside – from the old English chepe (market) – was the undisputed high street of London before the fire. One of its most distinctive features, at the eastern end of the street, was the Great Conduit fountain, pictured here to the right of the Cheapside Cross.

From the 1230s to 1666, the Great Conduit channelled free water from the River Tyburn to Cheapside in lead pipes via the Strand and Fleet Street. Illegal siphoning was rife, reducing the water pressure – in Henry VI Part II, Shakespeare describes it as a “pissing-conduit” – and on the occasion of military victories, royal births and coronations, it sometimes ran with wine. As the fire spread, people dug desperately into the earth to puncture the conduit’s water supply, hoping the water might quench the flames – in vain – and the Great Conduit itself was razed to the ground along with Cheapside on Tuesday 4 September.

St Paul’s Cathedral, ‘the wonder of medieval London’, as it looked before being burned down

Gothic St Paul’s

Old St Paul’s was the wonder of medieval London. It was the fourth cathedral to stand on the site, built from Caen stone after the Norman Conquest, and finished in 1314. It was its monumental timber-and-lead spire that visitors noticed first (until it was struck by lightning in 1561), rising to 489 feet. Not until the BT Tower was built in 1964 would another building soar so high in London.

The remorselessly gothic exterior was much sterner than Christopher Wren’s neoclassical successor, with flying buttresses, pointed windows, and sharp turrets. As one of the biggest covered public spaces in London, a bazaar-like atmosphere prevailed inside, with lawyers tossing coins in the baptismal font, farmers’ wives selling fruit and ale, and apprentices shooting arrows at the jackdaws and pigeons in the rafters, smashing the holy windows. Riding high in the eastern wall was the famous rose window, bathing the high altar in kaleidoscopic light.

When St Paul’s burned down on the third day of the fire, a local thunderstorm broke out with forks of apocalyptic lightning radiating from the blazing building. Eventually, the roof melted, sending streams of molten lead pouring down Ludgate Hill “glowing with fiery redness” as people ran for their lives.

The Steelyard depot of the Hanseatic merchants. Illustration: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty

The Steelyard

“Foreigners are ill-regarded, not to say detested in London,” observed a Venetian visitor to the capital in 1617 – one reason, no doubt, the 400 German merchants of the Hanseatic League (an economic alliance of German cities) lived a sequestered life in the Steelyard. This motley collection of wharves, storehouses, a tavern, guildhall, mint, chapel, and lodgings – all engirdled by a stone wall – amounted to a mini city-within-a-city.

Since the early 13th century, successive kings allowed the foreign merchants to trade freely in England, immune from rent and taxation in exchange for surrendering their vessels in wartime. Their complex was razed to the ground in 1666, by which point they had lost most of their privileges after the jealous city guilds expressed anger regarding them towards Queen Elizabeth I. Today, its memory is effaced by Cannon Street Station.